Wheaton College Alumni Magazine Winter 2015 | Page 52

voice

FACULTY

Northern Light
For this professor, HoneyRock serves as a renewing force—a retreat
where the Holy Spirit blows freely.

a

by Dr. Matthew J. Milliner ’98, assistant professor of art history

Greg Halvorsen Schreck

s an art historian who specializes in the
Middle Ages, I find that Wheaton’s
academic and spiritual intensity reminds me
of a city of praise founded a thousand years
ago: the Cluny monastery in central France.
But that’s not entirely a compliment. Cluny
was so successful—the liturgy so scrupulous,
its library so well stocked, and its monks
so intelligent—that it grew overconfident.
As a result, some monks headed north.
One of them, Bernard of Clairvaux,

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founded a monastery north of Cluny—just
as HoneyRock is north of Wheaton.
There at Clairvaux Abbey, Bernard
returned to the Benedictine order’s
emphasis on manual labor, simplicity, love,
learning, and self-denial. The monks that
came from Clairvaux, and from Cîteaux
before that, were known as Cistercians
(Cistercium is Latin for Cîteaux). Together
they saved the Benedictine order and
renewed Christianity in Europe. They
maybe even saved Cluny itself.
For me at least, HoneyRock is to
Wheaton as Clairvaux was to Cluny. It
serves as a renewing force—a northern
place of retreat with an emphasis on the
physical, as well as the life of the mind.
As a struggling sophomore in the late
1990s, I found participating in a semesterlong program at HoneyRock to be like
medicine, without which I may have bidden
Wheaton a bitter, permanent good-bye.
Now a new faculty member, I was
reminded last summer of HoneyRock’s
invigorating effects while leading
“Passage,” Wheaton’s Northwoods
orientation program for new students.
The highlight was a worship service that
included a long procession of students
walking through the considerable darkness
of the Northwoods.
The light from torches placed every
30 feet or so along our darkened path
bounced delicately off the smiling faces
of student leaders. For years I had been
studying the same phenomenon in Eastern
Orthodox icons. In a darkened church at
night, candles flicker in front of images of
the great Christians who have gone before

us, symbolizing the bright spots through
the spiritual darkness of the world. And
here I was, witnessing the same thing
at HoneyRock—except these Christian
“icons” were, of course, alive.
As we processed, we ascended
HoneyRock’s “ski hill,” enshrouded in
a heavy evening mist illuminated by our
torches. Our voices, unified in song, were
so full-hearted it seemed as though the hill
itself was radiating praises to Christ (which,
of course, it always is).
Weeks after that intensive liturgy on
ski hill, in the thick of fall semester, I was
checking out a pile of books from Buswell
Library. The day and the pace at Wheaton
had wearied me. I looked across the desk at
a student whose face I recognized from our
torch-lit procession, and I was reminded
of how the Holy Spirit sometimes blows
more freely in places set apart, whether in
northern France or northern Wisconsin.
I took a deep breath and said to him,
“We were more alive up there, weren’t we?”
He looked me with courteous compassion,
smiled, and said, “Yeah, but the point is to
bring some of that back down here.”
It is good counsel.

Dr. Matthew J. Milliner ’98 is assistant
professor of art history and holds a master’s and
Ph.D. in art history from Princeton University,
as well as a M.Div. from Princeton Theological
Seminary. His scholarly specialization is
Byzantine and medieval art, with a focus
on how such images inform contemporary
visual culture and theology. In 2013 he was
appointed a member of the Curatorial Advisory
Board of the United States Senate.
W H EA T O N . ED U / A L U M N I